From Reader to Writer

The concept of being a writer or an author always allured me. I see writers as the rare few who possess the ability to translate our weird human experience from foreign opinionated emotions to legible and thoughtful words. The writing process invokes constant filtration of ideas that almost guarantees absolute scrutiny. Even if unpolished ideas pass the writer unfiltered, there lies one last step of evaluation - the reader. Readers digest the product of  a writer's filtration process in a fraction of the time and have just as many thoughts and opinions. Writers depend on readers to hear them out with an open mind and readers depend on writers to inform and often change their mind. Nowadays, everyone is a critic but only because they are first readers.

The modern tech suffused world we live in baffles me. Industries compete for our attention, everything is an ad and I feel more disconnected globally in a theoretically more connected world. However, what I find myself thinking about often is the accessibility to become a writer today. Equipped with magical communication devices anyone can dispel ideas anytime and anywhere which is both incredibly empowering and precarious to me. Today, writers take form as influencers who have mastered short form communication such as captions, mini-videos or character limited thought snippets. This, I believe, is necessary to share complex ideas efficiently and effectively but sometimes at the cost of nuance and the filtration process that I love writers for.

Brittany Shephard, former White House Correspondent at Yahoo! News describes this issue in journalism as the "Ratatouille Problem". Anyone can cook. Anyone can be a journalist. Anyone can write. I'm entirely grateful for this problem because it allows me to share these thoughts yet I'm concerned for what it means for the reader/writer symbiosis. I want writers to translate our weird human experience from foreign opinionated emotions to legible and thoughtful words without the limit of 280 characters. I want readers to ponder over those thoughts and scrutinize the unfiltered.

But what do I know? I'm not a writer. I'm barely a reader in fact. I haven't read The Catcher in the Rye or War and Peace and I thought that The Great Gatsby was a solid meh and a half. In my defense, I cried for nearly 30 minutes reading Where the Red Fern Grows if that allows me to recover any of your respect in me.

I'm somewhat of a reader who is now transitioning over to finally becoming the allusive writer. I will filter if you will scrutinize. This may be my only post or the first of hundreds. I'm not sure. Regardless, I thank you for being my reader and I hope you stay for a bit.

-kf (05.29.2021)